Jennifer Lumba

Top 10 Tips for Organizing Your Social Media Life

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by Jennifer Lumba |
March 17, 2014

As the thaw approaches, so too does the seasonal urge for spring cleaning. Yet there’s more to the process than decluttering closets, sweeping the garage, and shipping off old goods to the local charity. Spring can also be a time to reflect and renew the various aspects of your business, including how you use social media to engage with partners, prospects, and customers.

What connections are obsolete? Are your feeds organized in such a way that you get what you need, when you need it? Who’s missing from your network? Asking (and answering!) these questions is an important step in optimising engagement, yet the process doesn’t end there.

Here are 10 more tips for organising your social media life:

1. Review your strategy. Your goals for achieving success on social media have probably changed over time. What’s different now than when you started online? Are you posting about different subjects or at a different job? Take stock of your current needs.

2. Categorize your contacts. Similarly, don’t presume that you’re connected to the right people. Evaluate and categorize your contacts across networks. See if you can figure out why you connected in the first place, and make note of instances where you can’t.

3. Look for holes. Your evaluation process will inevitably reveal surprises. Perhaps you’re in a business where brand leaders spend a lot of time online. Are you tracking them in your own feeds? If not, why?

4. Study conversations to find your “top” contacts. Make note of who you connect to most often, and why. These are the people most likely to help advance your efforts online. Give them the extra attention they deserve.

5. Search for inactive accounts. Similarly, take note of those who can’t offer you anything because their accounts have gone dark. Cut them loose and don’t look back.

6. Cut contacts you’ve been avoiding. There’s little purpose in staying connected to those whose posts you find unnecessary, ill informed, annoying, or the like. Disconnect, and if they follow-up to ask why, politely explain that you’ve evaluated your networks and notice that you rarely cross paths anymore.

7. Sharpen your topic focus. Your network should serve you. Increase your odds of yielding benefits by developing lists of friends and followers who post about the topics you care most about. Connect with them regularly, and ignore unrelated chatter.

8. Cut contacts outside of your topics. Just as connecting with your “top” contacts will yield outsized benefits, you’ll want to avoid noisemakers who exist on the margin. Drop them if you can. Or, if you’re afraid of offending them, ignore their blathering by focusing on your lists of top contacts.

9. Set a schedule for connecting with your network. Set limits to your time spent on social media. You’ll find yourself wanting to stay organised and focusing on your highest-value connections.

10. Automate as much as possible. Use RSS feeds and archiving tools for quickly gathering and saving material posted by your most valuable contacts. Set a time to review your findings, and then tag and save anything worth keeping. Delete the rest.

Spring cleaning needn’t be an annual ritual. In fact, when it comes to your social networks, your best bet is to evaluate and revise as often as your business interests change.

Jennifer Lumba is the chief marketing officer of Rideau Recognition Solutions. Built on state-of-the-art technology, Rideau’s employee recognition and customer loyalty programs change the way companies recognize employee service and achievement, reward individual and team performance, strengthen customer relationships, and create brand loyalty. Lumba can be reached at [email protected].